I am alternately peeved and sympathetic with Chip Roy, Ralph Norman and the others who torpedoed Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill. But after reading the fine print this morning and realizing that reforms to Medicaid don’t kick in until 2029 !!!! I am disgusted. I get that states need some time to adjust to a change in rules regarding Medicaid eligibility – maybe a year or 18 months — but do they really need four years? No, they do not. The extended timeframe is an obvious play to put political repercussions off until after the midterms. Legislators from swing districts fear losing their seats because able-bodied adults lose their free ride. They want to put off any change as long as possible.
On the other hand, those vulnerable legislators will almost certainly get canned if the 2017 tax cuts don’t get extended and Trump’s agenda crashes. We need both to get the bill passed, and to make it tougher.
The conservatives calling for bigger spending cuts are completely correct. Just ask Moody’s, which in recent days downgraded U.S. debt. Imagine, the United States of America has lost its triple-A status. (The other two major ratings agencies had already made this downgrade.) This would be a wake-up call except that most of our country is asleep, lulled into a false sense of complacency by hours spent on Tik-Tok or watching the NFL. We all need downtime, for sure, but we also need to pay attention to what’s happening with our country’s fiscal outlook. It isn’t good. Even the Fed, no friend to the Trump administration or to fiscal austerity, has announced it will cut staff and overhead. Of course, why the Fed has a headcount of 24,000 is a mystery. How can they employ so many people and still get it wrong most of the time?
This is the group that never spoke out against Biden’s reckless spending; it’s quite the switch.
Simply put, the country endorsed a huge surge in government spending to compensate for the wrong-headed directives during Covid that shut down schools, businesses and churches. The government under Trump wanted to keep Americans employed and the economy ready to rebound, which it did. Biden kept the spending at max level, refusing to let a crisis go to waste. Democrats in Congress and the Fed went along, spurring the highest inflation in decades.
Now we have to go back to the trend-line pre-Covid spending; the bill on the table doesn’t do that. Republicans must do better if they want to keep the majority.
